What is a brand awareness campaign?

If your goal is to launch a new brand, action, idea or product on the market, you need to know what a brand awareness campaign is. As we saw in our last PR 101, brand awareness is the recognition of a certain subject by the target audience.

The campaign can be developed using a set of public relations, paid media, content marketing, influencer marketing, social media and press relations actions. Each of these areas can put the client on the radar of its desired audience, generating curiosity, interest and authority, cultivating its reputation and serving as a bridge for new relationships.

Before rolling up your sleeves and creating a strategy, you need to understand some important details of what makes a brand awareness campaign. First of all, it is necessary to define the client’s objectives and thoroughly understand the campaign’s target audience: their age group, social group, interests, most accessed media, what they consume, their priorities, their beliefs and what they are looking for in the market in which the client acts.

With knowledge of these data in hand, it’s time to define the campaign’s theme and the message that it should convey to the audience. Texts, photos, videos, ads, arts, events, the identification of spokespeople, most suitable influencers, bylined articles, keywords and press releases are all part of this strategy.

Ready to go? Not yet. Before its launch, the client and the communications team get together to conduct a complete review of the strategy, its content, timeline and the methods for measuring the results of that campaign. With everything approved, it’s time to fasten your seat belts and launch yourself into the media.

Some details may seem small, but they are important to defining the success of a brand awareness campaign.

First of all: being in all media does not guarantee a greater chance of success. On the contrary, selecting the most appropriate channels to reach the campaign’s target audience allows for greater time savings in ineffective channels and ensures that the team concentrates all its energy on the media that will provide the best return on investment (ROI).

A solid public relations strategy is also crucial to the success of a brand awareness campaign. Seeing a certain product or company being mentioned frequently in the press gives the image of authority in a certain sector, both to the public and to the market in which the company operates. It puts the topic of the campaign on the public’s radar, who can therefore get to know it better, and feel more comfortable and interested in consuming it in the future.

Attracting the interest of the press to conduct interviews with company representatives and publish articles about the product, in online or offline media, increases the possibility of creating new relationships with journalists. With a full understanding of the product or company proposal, and its authority in the segment in which it operates, editors and reporters can start looking to the client for new opportunities.

One last point which needs to be well-aligned when launching a brand awareness campaign is the customer’s image in the media. When working with massive campaigns, we allow the product’s story to be told by others as well – via blogs, tweets, stories, videos and other platforms. This can be hazardous, especially if the client has had image crises in the past.

Having a public relations team staying ahead of the campaign allows for a closer look at the media in which the company is mentioned, and the content of the articles published about it. This makes it possible to act quickly in situations where the brand needs to take a position on a certain subject, clarify questions and respond to feedback.

Truly understanding the power of what is a brand awareness campaign is invaluable for boosting brands, products and actions in new markets – especially in Latin America, a region in constant expansion, with tremendous cultural, economic and linguistic diversity.